A detail from La Tentation de Saint Antoine, which France will return to its rightful owner. The painting, by Sebastien Ricci, had been on display at the Louvre museum in Paris. Photograph: Jacques Brinon/AP

France is to return seven paintings stolen, or appropriated under pressure by the Nazis, from their Jewish owners in the 1930s to their families on Tuesday.

The paintings were destined to be displayed in an art gallery Adolf Hitler planned to build in Austria, where he grew up. Four of the works have been hanging in the Louvre in Paris.

Between 1933 and 1945, the Nazis purloined about 100,000 paintings, sculptures and other valuable objects in Jewish private collections in Europe. Some were stolen, others were sold under pressure, often to fund an escape from German occupation and the death camps.

France will also return the Miracle de la Saint Eloi by Gaetano Gandolfi San Matteo della Decima. Photograph: Jacques Brinon/AP

At the end of the second world war, much of this was found; France received 65,000 artefacts, of which almost three-quarters were returned to their owners.

The story of how the looted works were tracked down will be the plot of a forthcoming Hollywood film, directed by and starring George Clooney, called The Monuments Men.

Of the works that remained, 2,140 of the most valuable were sent to French museums across the country.

Six of the seven works being handed back belonged to Robert Neumann, an Austrian Jew who fled to France and then Cuba, selling some of his collection to fund his escape. The paintings will be given to Neumann's grandson, Tom Selldorff, 82, who lives in the US.

The seventh work, by the German painter Pieter-Jansz van Asch, belonged to Josef Wiener, a Prague Jew who died in a German concentration camp, and whose collection was sold by the Nazis in 1941.

The French culture minister, Aurélie Filippetti, said she wanted to introduce a "proactive search" to find the owners of the despoiled artworks. "It's as much a moral issue as a scientific one," she told Le Figaro.